Bon Appetit!

Tonight I sat down for my dinner and for really the first time, I had to ASK Esther what I was eating. She clearly didn't know the word for it, (her English is not that good, pretty much limited to OK, shower? and you eat now) and so went off to get what it was and show me. She returned with an egg. I tasted the stuff. It was like egg with tomatoes and onion all cooked together. Now you're thinking she made me an omelet and I'm an idiot. The egg looked almost like cheese... I'm sure there wasn't cheese in it, since we don't have such things (lack of refrigeration)... cheese with chunks. Or cat vomit. So I tried it. It really wasn't that bad, but just the look of it... I moved on to the pasta and potatoes she had made and didn't look back.

This led me to think, I should write about the food here. So here we go.

Breakfast is the most consistent meal. When Esther makes me breakfast, she makes tea (African tea is great, when she makes it for breakfast, she just makes hot water, and so I add as much sugar as I want (about one percent of the amount they add typically), and a hardboiled egg. The yolks freak me out, so I just salt the white and eat that part. She also always puts out bread with Blue Band and Zesta. Blue Band is supposed to be like margarine, except its designed so you don't have to refrigerate it. I just put it on my bread with the Zesta (mixed fruit jam, that similarly does not require refrigeration), but once I tasted it on its own, and its really more like yellow shortening than butter. But I still put it on everything...

Now that my stove is set up, I can make my own breakfast, so I usually stick with the bread/Blue Band/Zesta combination and then scramble some eggs. MMM.

Lunch I eat with the staff, and since Esther is cooking for a crowd, its a less exotic meal. Usually rice and beans, or posho and greens. Posho is pretty interesting... its made of corn (they say maize here) and is sort of the consistency of a mushy, less grainy cornbread. It basically tastes like nothing, but then you put beans with sauce or something with sauce on it, and it just takes on the flavor of whatever you put it with. Carbs are BIG here, needless to say. The greens - they were the one thing so far that I really just couldn't stand (the egg thing tonight I thought wasn't that bad, just it looked to gross to eat). The smell alone of the greens nearly made me puke, but I tried them anyway. The taste was less appealing than the smell, so I gave Jackline (one of the clinic staff) my greens, ate my posho, then snuck off to my apartment for half of a Clif Bar.

I have 35.5 Clif Bars left. I'm trying to ration them slowly, in case some new awful food comes along! Haha, no really, the food isn't that bad.

Dinner is where the most variety comes in. It might be any of the following options:

"Irish Potatoes" - she actually said to me, do you want Irish potatoes? This just means, slicing up potatoes, sauteeing them with some tomatoes. I eat them with ketchup. Goodtimes

RIce - self explanatory

Pasta - if it is spaghetti, they break it up into smaller pieces when they cook it, as if I couldn't eat a longer strand on my own (granted, I have been known to sub Rigatoni for linguine in my Chix Parm at the Tombs because it is "too hard to eat". but whatever). They also put oil into EVERYTHING so for the pasta picture like what you'd make for a picky kid, pasta with lots of butter.

Stew - there is usually some kind of stew with meat. The meat they get in the village, and then cut up and cook it for about 9 hours until that shit is DEAD. they really do not mess around. I asked Doug about it, and he said that since the meat here is just like "look we have a cow. I'm hungry, lets kill it!" and isn't corn-fed or organically raised or even very well fed at all usually, you have to cook it all the way since otherwise... something bad could happen. First thing I need to eat when I get home: some EXTRA RARE FILET MIGNON. bam.

Cabbage - they love cabbage here. They do it with lots of... guess what? oil. It ends up tasting like someone took a Chinese Egg Roll and dumped out the filling. I like to wrap it in a Chapatti and pretend I'm in Chinatown at Tony Cheng's and we just PUNISHED the hell out of Villanova (or some other hateable rival)

Chapattis - fried dough awesomeness. More on this in the "tea" section

Sauce bowl - sometimes she makes a sort of tomato sauce that would make Italy turn over in its grave and Sicilians everywhere start a mafia war against Africa. Its like stewed tomatoes (like I said, they cook things well here, EVERYTHING, that includes vegetables. I think bread is the most raw thing I've had here), garlic, some onion - sometimes there is pasta involved that you can put it on, sometimes not. If there's rice or potatoes I can usually put it on that, or on my super hard chunks of meat.

Meat - meat here means beef. People don't really eat chicken. The meat is cooked just about till you can't chew it easily. They also don't do a particularly good job of cutting off huge chunks of bone or fat. Last night I had pieces of meat in my "stew" that were literally pieces of bone. Or a chunk of fat. Usually you pick up a piece of meat and cut off a bit of fat to eat it, this was just the opposite.

Something really nice we do is have tea time every morning. Usually around 11 am. The clinic just basically shuts down and the people wait while the staff all have tea. This means African Tea - they mix the sugar in for you. Picture Southern Sweet Tea that is boiling hot, and you've got an idea of this. Its actually pretty good, but when I make my own, I just can't bring myself to add 4 tablespoons of sugar to my mug. Go figure. Then they have either Chapattis or G-Nuts. The chapattis are kind of flaky and you can pull them apart in layers. As referenced earlier its just fried dough - they're great. I like to spread Zesta on them for breakfast, eat them by themselves (using my honed-over-many-years-pull-your-Kohler's-Croissant-apart-all-over-the-kitchen-table-in-Avalon-approach). I'm thinking if I put a little Blue Band (whats some extra grease, really?) and sugar on top I'd have an African funnel cake. Oh the possibilites. G-nuts - my opinion here is limited since I am allergic to the things. Explaining that was pretty fun, allergies I guess are not so common over here. But they are sort of like peanuts, that when they are served, they are already cracked open and put into a paper funnel that you eat them out the top of. It looks like fun. So does my throat swelling shut.

Well thats about it on the food front. Please don't get me wrong, I for the most part enjoy the food here. At least I eat it and deal when its not perfect. The main thing is, its DIFFERENT from home - another part of my experience. Hope you enjoyed the descriptions.

I'm thinking of writing the next post as a sort of Ugandan Casual Awards. Thoughts?



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